Showing titles in Writing & Publishing

Natalie Goldberg has been writing for the past fifty years. But at the beginning of the pandemic, she suddenly wasn’t able to write anymore. Her imaginative wellspring had dried up, and she was forced to ask herself: what do I do when what has always worked for me doesn’t work anymore? In this beautifully written, inspiring personal account, Natalie shares her harrowing journey out of creative paralysis and back onto the page.

In this brilliant, fierce, and funny memoir of transformation, Jami Attenberg—described as a “master of modern fiction” (Entertainment Weekly) and the “poet laureate of difficult families” (Kirkus Reviews)—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself. What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one’s ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?

This fun and exciting guide shows you how to write an autobiography or biography that will bring your story to life. It begins by introducing you to all the different forms a life story can take, from journals to blogs to magazine articles to complete memoirs. Then, it helps you organize your story into either chronological, thematic, or anecdotal form. You'll receive a powerful set of writing tools, and learn how to use story structure, viewpoint, dialogue, and settings to make your story clear and vivid.

Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces, and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens, and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the Bard's manuscripts, books, or letters has ever been found.

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections.

As an author, it's not just enough to write an amazing book. In today's crowded marketplace, building a brand is essential to stand out and make a lasting impression on readers. In "Top Ten Ways to Brand Yourself as an Author," we provide a top ten guide to help you define your brand identity, create a unique logo, develop a consistent visual identity, build a professional website, use social media to promote your brand, create valuable content, leverage email marketing, collaborate with other authors and brands, participate in events and conferences, and stay true to your brand.

For everyone who's ever wanted to write a memoir but is having trouble starting, finishing, or is stuck somewhere in between. Here's the place to get the answers to your questions (and to the questions you didn't know to ask) in one concise volume.

In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market.

Writing a book is a career milestone that only the most elite professionals and thought leaders can achieve—right? Wrong! With the right combination of preparation, commitment, and ambition, anyone can (and should) share their professional expertise in a book. Adding your voice to the conversation leads to a stronger, more inclusive tech industry.

This CliffsNotes study guide on George Orwell's 1984 supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, a graphical character map, critical commentaries, expanded glossaries, and a comprehensive index, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work. This study guide was written with the assumption that you have read 1984. Reading a literary work doesn’t mean that you immediately grasp the major themes and devices used by the author....

The Power of Memoir is a pioneering how-to book that provides a new step-by-step program to use memoir writing as a therapeutic process. By going through these steps, you'll learn how to choose the significant milestones and turning points that make up a coherent story leading to a life-changing epiphany.

Whether you simply want to jot down family folklore to share with future generations or wish to try your hand at writing a best-selling novel, Just Write! provides gentle yet realistic guidance for those who want to write their first book. With her humorous—yet realistic—explanations of the writing process, Lauren Bingham is here to help you make your first book become a reality. You’ll receive the encouragement you’ve been craving, as well as the empathy a new writer needs.

Audible editor Katie O’Connor explores the craft of writing for the audio format with Audible Originals authors Samantha Allen, Lauren Blakely, Dennis Mahoney, and Ben H. Winters. Listen in as the authors discuss how they changed their approach to their work with audio in mind. You’ll also hear from two Audible Originals editors - Lara Blackman and Steve Feldberg - about how they collaborate with their authors and where they think the future of audio is going.  

The news is everywhere. We can’t stop constantly checking it on our computer screens, but what is this doing to our minds? We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives.

The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest of business ventures. Certainly, no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.

Vibrant, believable characters help drive a fictional story. Along with a clever plot, well-drawn characters make us want to continue reading a novel or finish watching a movie. In Creating Characters, Dwight V. Swain shows how writers can invent interesting characters and improve them so that they move a story along.

International Emmy nominated writer Mark Boutros offers a guide to creating characters who are engaging, emotionally driven, and memorable. With experience writing comedy, drama, and novels, Mark shares a mixture of theory, exercises, and pitfalls, getting you thinking about the questions you should always have in your mind during character creation. This is an invaluable tool for beginner and experienced writers.

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. The start of a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, Letters to a Writer of Color will be a touchstone for aspiring and working writers and for curious readers everywhere.

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.